This would then be another prime example of muddying the waters. I’m sure you are well intentioned, and I hope you don’t take offense. To be helpful perhaps you could get more informed?
None of those seem obviously or naturally part of GAE.
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I know the basic claims of GAE and also know they are “made up”. I could equally come up with my version of genealogical ancestors, say ECA, meaning Extraterrestrial Chidi and Ada, who were two exiled aliens seeking refuge on other inhabited planets: they landed here several thousands of years ago, produced descendants who went on to interbreed with humans outside the “alien refugee zone”; These aliens used a highly advanced tech to modify their molecular biology to perfectly resemble that of humans to prevent detection. Eventually, only lineages born from that admixture survived, making ECA the recent common ancestor of all modern humans.
Sounds like its made up right? That’s because it is. The beginning of the story sort of stamps the signature of fiction on its remaining parts. If I wrote a book on this story, you don’t need to read it in its entirety to know I am writing fiction.
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So in your view, I made up the Adam and Eve account, and some how put it into texts written several thousands of years ago. Right…
No. You made up GAE, which recruits an equally made up AE tale.
I might seem insulting, but its not my intention. GAE is a largely satisfactory hypothesis that obviates virtually all skirmishes between an evolutionary account of human origins and a link to an ancestral, sinful couple. I sincerely applaud your efforts to unravel its possibility amid the raging evolution-creation battles
IMO all this talk about evidence for GAE claims is unnecessarty because its supposed to solve a theological problem, not a scientific one. David Kwon’s comments took us down this path and I would prefer if we both departed from it.
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Sigh.
You really need to get informed. I did not make up the GAE. It has been wondered about for a very long time. Perhaps start be reading the book you are so certain deserves a stiff critique.
Is it? It comes across as performative and insincere to me.
Here’s an example:
https://www.nature.com/articles/352547b0.pdf
That comes across as merely performative. What about errors you have not admitted?
I’m just saying that question cuts both ways, and it seems you agree 
No, IMO there are extremely important ethical and operational differences that (unless one is lucky) can lead to problems.
If I make a claim that I believe to be false, I am being dishonest.
If I articulate and/or test a hypothesis that I believe to be false, I am not being dishonest.
Sometimes the hypothesis that I believe to be false is trivially easy to test. Sometimes I am testing a hypothesis I believe to be false because I predict that my manuscript’s or grant application’s reviewers will expect/demand that I do so.
A scientific hypothesis is much closer to a conditional statement, “If P then Q,” with P being a mechanism and Q being a special class of things: one or more empirical observations. I can make those statements without believing them, too.
Viewing one’s hypotheses as claims creates more attachment and makes scientific fraud much more likely.
Consider the saying, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
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The biochemist doesn’t have to believe in any of those hypotheses; she can articulate and test them without engaging in any dishonesty.
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Yeah I agree with your explication here, and in that full post.
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Oh snap. I knew a hypothesis statement is a conditional one, but I also thought it is a sort of claim, albeit a provisional one. That’s why I included “untested” or “poorly tested” in that description. However, looking up the definition of “claim” in the dictionary:
So a claim can mean an assertion (relevant to this context), and an assertion is a positive statement made without supporting evidence. A hypothesis is not an assertion, hence not a claim, because it does not hold a statement to be true in the absence of positive evidence. Instead, it can set up claims for testing. For example, a homeopath could claim/assert that his concoction speeds up the recovery rate of mildly or severely ill Covid-19 patients, but provide no positive evidence for it: using a well-defined hypothesis, a medical researcher can evaluate whether this claim is true or false (and we know how it has played out in real life 
)
Thus, GAE does not make assertions or claims about anything. I misused both words here. Thanks for clarifying @Mercer and @swamidass.
Same thoughts here. I misused “claim”.
The funny thing though is that I know they are different, but still got them confused and I know how. You know when we use the phrase “hypothesis testing”, what we really mean is “testing claims contained in a hypothesis”, so I think that at the moment I conflated a claim with its containing hypothesis. That was a silly mix up.
I agree too. I hope you can see now that I am willing to admit my errors.
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I hope this can be a relatively short post - my argument, articulated in my previous post, is constructed from mathematical first principles, using pretty much the only reasonable definition of evidence. I see no reason to add anything to it. But because this seems to be causing a lot of confusion, I will suggest the following posts from my blog as recommend reading:
- What is “evidence”? What counts as evidence for a certain position?
- Basic Bayesian reasoning: a better way to think (Part 1)
- Basic Bayesian reasoning: a better way to think (Part 2)
- Basic Bayesian reasoning: a better way to think (Part 3)
- Basic Bayesian reasoning: a better way to think (Part 4)
I will also answer some of your critiques:
@Michael_Okoko :
So, by your own admission, you suck at probability theory, and you haven’t read the book. And then, instead of addressing my argument, you construct your own GAE-based probabilistic argument which is only designed to be knocked down?
Ideally, you should do all 3 - get good at probability theory, read the book, then address my argument. Please make some progress along at least some of these directions if you want to have a productive discussion.
Bayes’ rule is a mathematical law. While it’s true that that humans can have valid thoughts that they can’t fully articulate in Bayesian terms, going against the framework itself is a non-starter. My calculations in my previous post were performed in that framework. If you want to engage with them, I suggest you do so with their actual content rather than trying to attack the framework itself.
I never said that oceanographers would be directly affected by a parallel world. Here is what I did say. @John_Harshman may want to pay attention to this part too:
This is important, as it lies at the heart of Bayes’ rule. Again, In each case, the thing that gets revolutionized/updated is the hypotheses that made germane statements about the discovery. The discovery of a parallel universe, or the world-serpent, are exceptions to that rule, but ONLY because they’d be such a momentous discoveries as to trigger multiple scientific revolutions in other fields with unforeseeable consequences.
@Mercer :
This quote seems to have been an issue to @glipsnort as well, but a familiarity with Bayesian thinking lets the problem resolve itself. Again, Bayes’ rule is a mathematical law. It applies to any H and E, where H and E are any proposition whatsoever. This actually allows for a unified view of evidence. For instance, what do you do with simulations? Certainly, there’s a lot of important science being done with simulations, but should we throw them out because they’re not “empirical”? You can try to add yet another ad-hoc rule about simulations for what counts as “evidence”, but Bayes’ rule takes care of this completely naturally. H and E can be empirical evidence, or simulations, or personal testimonies, or any proposition.
Anyway, not to worry - all of my claims in my previous post are based either on empirical evidence, or simulations that were good enough to be published.
So, the error you exhibit here is to include the evidence as part of the hypothesis. They’re supposed to be separate in the evaluation. Bayes’ factor is P(E|H) / P(E|~H), not P(E|EH) / P(E|E~H). The latter would of course be 1: of course nothing is evidence if you simply say you had known it all along.
This is a common enough error that I wrote a post specifically about it in 2015, titled “a common mistake in Bayesian reasoning”. I suggest you give it a read, especially the section that starts with “Furthermore, your friend tried to sneak in the evidence”.
This is actually a really fun question! Thanks for asking it. I’ll try to answer it in an upcoming blog post - it’s one of the well-known puzzlers for for people who are limited to conventional propositional logic, and there’s been a lot of ink spilled about it while arguing in circles, but a proper Bayesian formulation actually cleans up the problem really nicely, while giving the correct answer, explaining why it’s so confusing for conventional logic, and yielding additional insights! You’ll have to wait for it, though - let’s get the easy problems out of the way before we tackle the harder ones.
Thank you for understanding. As I said before, different things can count as different amounts of evidence for different people, and your quote here illustrates that nicely. I think this provides a neat segway for deciding what kinds of people are affected by my central claim.
Again, my central claim, backed up by Bayes’ rule, is:
So, this would apply to anyone who thought evolution was evidence against Adam and Eve. After all, you have to take back your evidence if it’s no longer applicable. As @John_Harshman said, this is “many biologist”, and given that GAE is still not well-known, I’d say that this is a sizable majority of biologists.
It would also apply to anyone engaged in the creation-vs-evolution controversy, which, as @glipsnort said, was a “modest-sized part of American culture”. All those should consider GAE as major evidence as well.
Incidentally, thank you both for convincing me to drop “career” from my condition, when I said “…whose beliefs and career were largely based on the idea…”. Of course, dropping a condition in an “and” statement makes it apply to more people. So you’ve strengthened my argument, and made it more broadly applicable!
It would also certainly apply to Richard Dawkins, for whom the evidence of GAE is “astonishing”, as I explained above. And given that he’s an iconic atheist evolutionary biologist who’s very involved in the whole “science vs. religion debate”, I’d say that it applies to a good chunk of people who meet any of those descriptions.
That’s a whole lot of people. Enough for me to make the statement for the general population, with the obvious note that there will be some exceptions. But in general, GAE is a major piece of evidence for the veracity of the Biblical account of Adam and Eve.
I don’t need to know probability theory or read the book to know that you are wrong when you say things like this:
Because GAE is a hypothesis, not evidence.
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I’m going to give a quick reply here because it may prevent other people from falling into the same confusion, but as I said earlier:
So when I say “GAE”, I mean the body of work involved in the hypothesis of GAE, including all the evidence presented in it. Basically all the evidence in the book itself. That’s cumbersome to write, so I just write “GAE”, which, incidentally, links to the page featuring the book. Which you should really read.
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So why were you claiming the entire time that GAE is evidence for AE, if you are now acknowledging its a hypothesis?
More importantly, briefly list the lines of evidence that positively support GAE you claim exist.
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Didn’t.
Have you figured out that it’s also strong positive evidence for Ask and Embla? Manu and Shatrupa? Mashya and Mashyanag?
More broadly, yes. But it still applies to no people, ever, in the real world.
Nope. His beliefs are not largely based on any such ideas.
You can say anything, but that doesn’t make it true.
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Um, what? I haven’t suggested that Bayes’ rule is incorrect; I’ve questioned your application of it. One example: your use of Richard Dawkins’s surprise at the recency of our most recent common genealogical ancestor as an estimator for how likely such a recent date is under a non-creationist model. That’s absurd. You don’t determine the probability of a set of observations under a model by how surprised somebody is who doesn’t work with the model and has probably never thought about the specific question in his life. If you want to use a Bayesian framework to assess Dawkins’s personal state of belief, you can do so, but it’s irrelevant to accurately estimating the posterior probabilities of the two models.
So you’re saying that oceanography would be revolutionized by the discovery and that oceanographers would be unaffected by it? Or they would be indirectly affected by it? How would that happen? Oceanography is not going to be revolutionized by a change in our understanding of particle physics.
I’m familiar with Bayesian thinking and have published numerous studies that relied on it. I find your previous statement completely unilluminated by placing it in a Bayesian context.
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There is for example a lot of evidence of interbreeding across the globe. That is not merely absence of conflict, but positive evidence for recent universal ancestors.
Nothing in that data suggests those recent universal ancestors were AE (or my extraterrestrial Chidi and Ada), neither does it suggest that those who engaged in this widespread interbreeding included descendants of AE. In addition, these recent ancestors had ancestors as well like Mt-Eve and Y-Chr-Adam, which doesn’t sit well with a de novo creation event.
Evidence for the possibility of an idea, is not evidence for the idea itself.
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